Tag: Reddit

Opera Software is no stranger to theatrics. Back when Opera 8 was released, Jon S. von Tetzchner, then CEO of Opera, attempted a cross-Atlantic swim to celebrate 1 million downloads. However, when it comes to going viral, Firefox always managed one up Opera.

A lot has changed since then. Opera now has more than 140 million users, and also seems to be getting really good at leveraging social media. Earlier in the year, Opera had us in splits with the Odd and Even browser speed test parody. However, as we have seen on numerous occasions, the best of the best viral stuff are impromptu creations with a touch of genius. That’s what happened yesterday.

Yesterday, a Redditor, who described himself as a “person with zero creative talent”, offered to draw anything requested by the community in MS Paint. An Opera employee, who also appears to be an avid Redditor, quickly took the opportunity to request a picture of Tetzchner riding a narwhal over a double rainbow. As an added incentive, he offered to put up the result on the home page of Opera. Here’s what the fellow Redditor came up with.

Opera Software obviously has quite a few avid Redditors. In fact, they have been campaigning heavily on Reddit for the past few weeks. Besides purchasing ad impressions, they also did an IamA (I am a), which was a roaring success. Opera Software was widely applauded for “doing it right” and clocked in more than 35,000 downloads from their Reddit campaign. They obviously got a few more yesterday. Well done!

Reddit is hiring once again and the job announcement post was made on the fourth of November at their blog. They need some sort of an expert. Your field of expertise can vary. To be clear, they say,

You don’t have to be a superstar programmer, if you make up for it by being a superstar Unix admin, systems architect, or distributed databases expert.

You are supposed to submit your resume at a specific URL and how to obtain the URL? Well, here is the announcement and the geeky part.

To apply, you’ll need to solve a puzzle. We’re only accepting resumes sent in via www.reddit.com/apply/X, where…

X = A * B * C * D

A is the first byte of the ICMP section of the packet that a router will send back when it sees a ping which has hopped too many times

B is the integer nearest to how much an Olympic-sized swimming pool of the minimum depth would weigh, in gigagrams, if it were filled completely with solid gold

C is the four-digit year in which the company whose data-link layer addresses look like08:00:09:??:??:?? registered its primary domain name

D is the decimal HTML entity for the Unicode character “â„œ” (which is not the same as the ASCII letter “R”)

If you’re smart enough to solve the puzzle, please don’t show off. This whole plan will only work if everyone can bite their tongue, so we’re just going to ask you to please, as a special favor to reddit, keep the secret a secret. Thanks!

Companies sure are getting smart but these web-based companies will be way ahead of their rivals because they have the power of imagination. Without imagination, we would have been content with what we have in life.

However, I did not understand something.All this for one position? Reddit rocks.

If you are an American citizen, be weary, be very weary of the airports. TSA’s (Transportation Security Administration) new enhanced security protocol grants screeners the right to subject anyone to a full body backscatter scan. Not only is the scanner shockingly detailed, but also injurious to health.

Of course, you can opt out. However, in that case you will have to endure an enhanced pat-down search during the course of which the screener is free to palm your privates. Here’s a particularly graphic account shared by a popular blogger:

She then moved in front of my (sic) and touched the top and underneath portions of both of my breasts. She did not tell me that she was going to touch my breasts. She then felt around my waist. She then moved to the bottoms of my legs. She then felt my inner thighs and my vagina area, touching both of my labia. She did not tell me that she was going to touch my vagina area or my labia…

…I stood there holding my baby in shock. I did not move for almost a minute. I stood there, an American citizen, a mom traveling with a baby with special needs formula, sexually assaulted by a government official. I began shaking and felt completely violated, abused and assaulted by the TSA agent. I shook for several hours, and woke up the next day shaking.

Even as the horror stories continue pouring in, Americans are beginning to collectively raise their voice against TSA’s invasive procedures, and for this they are resorting to the internet. Reddit is trying to gain the attention of the mainstream media by collectively tweeting the following:

@cnn Mr. President: Would you send Michelle/Sasha/Malia through TSA screening? Naked photos or invasive genital groping, you get to pick.

Others have decided to mark Thanksgiving as National Opt out day to gain the attention of lawmakers. Campaigns are also being organised through Twitter.

How do you feel about TSA’s new security measures? Is violating the dignity of a human being the only way to ensure safety? Is this really needed?

Digg users all over the world are particularly unhappy about the redesign and the Digg V4. However, another faction on the internet, the redditors have seen an increase in traffic after the Digg redesign.

From the very first day of the redesign, Digg saw a usurping revolt. The first page was flooded with Reddit links as a protest. The redesign has also brought some undesirable changes as the first page only shows links from top-notch blogs like Engadget. However, Digg has been biased about undoing the change and believes that it will get acceptance someday.

Reddit, on the other hand is enjoying this show as its own traffic has gone up by twenty-four percent. The coincidence of numbers is amusing even though their relation might be irrelevant. Everyone who leaves Digg will not necessarily join Reddit.

This war between Digg and Reddit took and interesting phase and the redesign being a #fail, Digg’s growth is a big question mark now. On one hand, it has already lost too much to continue any further while on the other hand, the growth and acceptance it was expecting will never realize down if Digg reverts to the earlier design. Digg has to decide and decide fast and right.

Has it ever happened to you that as a webmaster, you change the design on your site and your readers hate it so much, they make life hell for you. Kevin Rose is in a similar situation right now because his Digg redesign is firing back on him. It has been quite some time now and Digg is still flooding with Reddit news on the front page.

The new submission system on Digg encourages users to submit their own content and this is saturating Digg just as it was earlier. Digg is notorious for being full of spammers and the submission system on site is in favor of big players like Engadget and CNN.

Funnily enough, the Reddit posts are submitted by the same auto-submission feature introduced in the new version of Digg. Now, as pointed out by many, it is not unusual for a site to get some initial resistance but this is massive revolt from users who are up-voting Reddit posts madly.

Digg is in trouble and it needs to respond fast to retain its dedicated users. People already hate the new but the defacing is what is more worrisome.

Is Reddit having funding problems in spite of doing 280 million pageviews per month? Reddit is supposed to be a place for great geek minds. It is famous for its geeky humor and for doing stories and threads rarely found elsewhere.

This popularity pushed Reddit to 280 million pageviews per month, which is humongous in itself. However, the funniest part of this is that Reddit is not really monetizing this traffic. On top of that, it has started to face some monetary issues and has considered asking for donations from its readers.

A large part of this world believes that the Internet has been successful because of the availability of free porn. Though, it is one thing to have porn on your computer and another thing to hide it like a pro.

The folks at Reddit continue to amaze me. This thread at Reddit tells us how to hide porn effectively using Linux. I will quote the exact talk excerpt for you to have a good ROFL moment.

<Pryoidain> What are you trying to hide? <asaph> Nothing that needs encryption, I just want it to be tricky to find. <Pryoidain> got a separate /tmp partion? <asaph> of course. <Pryoidain> unmount it then copy shit to /tmp. It will actually copy it to the /tmp directory on the ROOT filesystem. then when you remount /tmp, the directory becomes a pointer, pointing to the real one, but without removing any of your files in the physical directory on the root system. <Pryoidain> No one will ever find them unless /tmp fails to mount, or they’re looking for it. even if they’re looking for it, they’ll see them in /tmp and assume their garbage, that is if you name them right. <asaph> …that’s fucking genius. <Pryoidain> I know, I’ve been hiding my porn under the /boot directory for about 3 years now.

The talk goes on to explain how effective the method is in hiding stuff you want to remain unseen. Now, that is what I call geekiness and it is the best abuse of the Linux file system. Worried about the files appearing on search? Well, another solution talks of doing a chmod 700 on the directory. See the thread here.

So, what is your preferred method of hiding porn? Believe me; I do not want to know.

The Internet is a wonderful place as it has something for everyone out there. We have seen Internet help people in their real lives as well. We have seen Facebook unite parents with lost kids, Twitter updates put as evidence in court cases but this case I found is the best so far.

A Reddit user, maltokyo has lost is car and is harnessing the uber geek mind of Reddit to get it back. All he has in hand is a series of surveillance videos of the person entering the parking area in his own car and then taking driving away with our victim’s car. Maltokyo here wants the folks at Reddit to zoom in on the video, enhance it the Jack Bauer style and get him a match for the number plate on the car.

He has taken this amount of pain after he was sent away by the police for lack of evidence. This data, if collected successfully will be his evidence in the case. The incident has already made him sort of a local hero and has featured in the local newspaper.

The guys at Reddit are trying all sorts of filters on the videos and have narrowed down the search to a few number plates in a mere one days. You can follow the investigation at this thread.